Bruno Chaouat- on Sabbatical '08-'09
 |
Department of French and Italian |
Statement of Interests
I work on 19th- and 20th-century French literature and thought, drawing on my interest in critical theory and contemporary literary debates to explore the relationship between language, experience, and memory. My work has addressed the writer's dispossession in the face of death and has articulated theoretically the questions of testimony and experience with those of language and writing. After having organized and edited the proceedings of a colloquium on shame at Cerisy-la-Salle, I am currently at work on a book manuscript, Jewish Envy: France After Anti-Semitism. Since 2000, the Western press has been inundated with accounts of an uncanny revival of Jew-hatred in France. With a counter-intuitive title suggesting that France is anti-Semitism-free because it is Holocaust-aware, I wish to highlight the mutations in public, literary and speculative discourse with regard to the representation of the Jews since the Holocaust. My book shows that the Jews, in post-Christian and post-Holocaust France, remain a problem and an open wound. I analyze post-WWII and especially post-1960s discourse about Jews and the memory of the Holocaust in culture, literature, literary theory and philosophy-a discourse that can be characterized as philosemitic. The image of the Jew that haunts post-Holocaust France combines the rejection of Jewish collective experience since the emancipation (1792) and the Pauline overcoming of Judaism. Such a representation, I conclude, determines the French politics of memory and inflects the perspective on the Middle East conflict.
Selected Publications
Books
Lire, écrire la honte (proceedings of the colloquium at Cerisy-la-Salle) (Presses Universitaires de Lyon, forthcoming 2006).
Je meurs par morceaux: Chateaubriand (Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1999).
Special Issues
"Writing One's Death: Between Fiction and Testimony," L'Esprit Créateur, 40:1 (2000) (Guest Editor).
"Chateaubriand inconnu," Revue des Sciences Humaines, 247 (1997) (Guest Editor).
Articles
"Nouvelles questions juives après le 11 septembre 2001," forthcoming 2007, Controverses, Paris
"In the Image of Auschwitz," forthcoming 2007, Diacritics
"Langues de terre: Au-delà du philosémitisme," forthcoming 2006, Critique
"Impasse: Entre Albert Memmi et Jacques Derrida," in press, Le Coq héron, special issue on shame, guest edited by Monique Selz, 2006.
"Forty Years of Suffering," L'Esprit Créateur, Fall 2005, Volume 15, Number 3, special issue "Suffering, Writing, Reading." Guest-editors: Martine Delvaux and Alexandre Dauge-Roth, pp. 49-62.
"Being in France," Modern Language Notes Volume 120, Number 4, (French Issue), pp. 790-806
"L'Amérique à fleur de peau," Sites: The Journal of 20th-Century/Contemporary French Studies, 8:4, 347-363.